How to Play Minecraft With Your Fellow Know-It-Alls

Greetings, traveler! In this step-by-step guide, you'll learn exactly all of the things you need to know and do in order to connect to the Han and Matt Know It All Patron-exclusive Minecraft server. We'll start this guide from the absolute beginning. But first, here's a tl;dr version that just contains the essential links:

0. What Is Minecraft?

In brief, Minecraft as a first-person survival game in which the world is made of building blocks that you can reshape to become just about anything your heart desires. It's a bit like playing with Legos, but you are the minifigure, and the building blocks and countless items are not only restackable but can be combined into intuitive new blocks and items with a robust crafting system. The game's clock spins as you explore your procedurally-generated, infinitely large world, going from day to night ad infinitum. The game creates monsters in the darkness, so if there's any one "goal" to Minecraft, it's to bring light to the world and bring safety to you and yours.

But if that were all there was to the experience, this game wouldn't have endured as it has through the years! Minecraft can be played in so many different ways, from building to designing to caving to mining to adventuring and to so many possibilities that you can create. Additionally, Minecraft has one of the most active, fervent community of modders ever, and the game has grown and expanded in spectacular ways. Personally? I'm rather obsessed with the many RPG enhancements, which is why I've added many of them to our server.

A most excellent thing about Minecraft is that you can play with friends across most platforms, meaning that if you're playing on a Mac and your friend is playing on a PC, you can connect and play together! Most games don't have such a thing, but Minecraft isn't like other games; it's a cool game.

Once you've downloaded the mods, you're going to want to open and install one of the following two Forge files, depending on your OS:

Make sure you select the "Install Client" option during installation.

Forge is what enables Minecraft to run the mods in your "mods" folder. If you've kept your installation location to the default one, Forge will automatically find your Minecraft folder and be installed within seconds.

These part is advanced and optional, but you're likely to experience performance lag with Minecraft's default settings. If you know that your computer has sufficient ram to allocate more resources to Minecraft, follow this wikiHow guide on changing the amount of ram that Minecraft uses. I've personally set mine to 4G and everything runs like a dream. On the flip side, this Reddit guide walks through steps to make Minecraft run more smoothly if you have an older, less powerful computer.

3. Launching Minecraft & Finding Our Server

Launch Minecraft and log in using your Mojang account. You'll be presented with a screen that includes, among other things, a big "PLAY" button. Before you click on that, you must first go to your Launch Options (if this isn't visible to you, click the hamburger menu button to expand it downward). From there, select "Add new," and select "forge-1.12.2-14.23.1.2555-installer" from the "Versions" pulldown menu. Then click "Save." All of this ensures that you will launch the game with Forge (and thus, with all of your mods) rather than with the default Minecraft launcher. See the three images below for reference:

Once in Minecraft, select "Multiplayer" and then "Add server" in the lower right. The Server Name can be whatever you'd like it to be, and the address is a series of numbers and punctuation exclusive to patrons. Check the pinned posts on our Discord channel to see what the server address is! Choose "Done" and then click the newly added server and click "Join Server." Finally, you're in Know-It-All-Land!

Basic Tips for Getting Started

Darkness is where monsters will spawn. Light up the world with torches to make it safer!

There are shared community resources in the center of town, so please store and replace common good there.

Feel free to claim a building that isn't currently occupied as your own home, but you're especially encouraged to make a home of your own around the perimeter of the town.

Your compass will always point you to the spawn point, the pillar of light on the pier in town.

You will drop all of your items on death, so try to always keep in mind where you're going relative to town or wherever you last slept.

If you're ever hopelessly lost, you can press F3 to see which direction you're facing and the X, Y, & Z coordinates of where you are in the world.

When your experience bar reaches level 5, you can pick a passive specialty with the "Level Up!" mod by pressing the L key on your keyboard. All experience levels banked by this system will remain spent even through death.

Final notes:

If the above steps aren't working for you, message me (Matt) on Discord and I'll do my best to troubleshoot.

Remember that one or both of us plan to be on the server every Wednesday evening from 7 PM-ish onward (EST time), but you're likely to find us on throughout the week.

Etiquette-wise: be cool? Don't troll other players. If you take community resources or level a forest, say, do your best to replace those resources as soon as you're able. But most importantly: have fun! Work together! Quest together! Build together!